MANAGEMENT INFORMATION FOR THE MEDIA INDUSTRY
22/01/2025

ECO3 acquires UK service company

17.10.2024

ECO3 today announced that it has acquired UK company Direct-to-Plate (DtP) Ltd., a well-established service and support provider to the UK printing industry. The deal that was signed last week will strengthen ECO3’s service network in the UK.

Commenting on the acquisition, ECO3’s Global Head of Sales & Service, Frederik Dehing said: “Providing excellent services has always been an integral part of the total prepress solutions we bring to market. Customers around the globe trust on ECO3 for the support of their consumables, equipment and software. This acquisition enforces our organization and ensures that our newspaper, commercial and packaging customers in the UK remain assured of the best possible after sales support available.” 

Eddie Williams, Head of Sales Europe, added: “We are bringing on board a team of highly experienced and professional engineers, providing 24/7 services to a broad range of equipment and software solutions. Their know-how will enable us to expand our reach and continue to provide the best services to our customers“. 

With immediate effect, the former DtP team will be integrated into ECO3 UK head office in Derbyshire. Customers of the former DtP company will continue to receive support and have access to spare parts supplied by former DtP.

The terms of the acquisition have not been made public.



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Training at HEIDELBERG supports orientation as a total solution provider for hybrid print production

17.10.2024
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Apprentices at HEIDELBERG support the company‘s orientation as a total solution provider with their commitment and enthusiasm. I
Apprentices and dual students who start their careers at and with Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG (HEIDELBERG) can expect a fascinating training program: digital, international, practical, with a view to the future! This is because HEIDELBERG is taking account of the increasing digitalization of job profiles in the graphic arts industry and is focusing on state-of-the-art standards, such as the use of digital learning management systems, end-to-end digital learning processes and, increasingly, artificial intelligence, when training qualified junior staff. This message has been well received and as of September 1, 2024, 125 young men and women will start their apprenticeships or dual studies at one of the four sites of the company in Germany, 87 of them at the Wiesloch-Walldorf site alone. This includes five trainees from cooperating companies as part of the HEIDELBERG „Training for third parties“ initiative.
Digital skills of young people support company orientation 
HEIDELBERG is a technology-neutral total solution provider that offers its customers a hybrid production environment in which all systems are integrated into a workflow, processes run largely autonomously and the software decides on the most economical output device. To achieve this, HEIDELBERG needs junior staff in almost all job profiles with the greatest possible affinity for IT and digital issues who can actively help shape this unique direction in the industry. This is why HEIDELBERG offers its trainees intensiv support from experienced staff right from the start and early involvement in practical projects, including internationally if necessary.
„The challenging training at HEIDELBERG is a central pillar of the company‘s competitiveness as a total solutions provider,“ says Jürgen Otto, CEO and Labour Director at HEIDELBERG. „We want the best trainees who are motivated and willing to perform. Numerous interesting career opportunities are open to them in the most diverse areas of a digital and international company.“

HEIDELBERG wants to get more young women interested in its apprenticeships 
The company offers apprenticeships in a total of fourteen professions: from electronics, mechatronics, industrial mechanics and materials testing, to the highly sought-after IT specialist, industrial clerks and media and logistics professions. In addition, there are a large number of dual study courses in the fields of IT, business administration and technology. HEIDELBERG is striving to increase the proportion of women, particularly in technical professions. HEIDELBERG has therefore been offering internships in technical professions for years. A new addition is an offer specially tailored to girls and young women in the form of a three-day technical internship for school pupils, which gives participants the opportunity to experience their technical and manual skills together in an all-female group.
„We want to encourage young women in particular to take an interest in exciting future topics and convince them of our attractive and high-quality training opportunities,“ says Jürgen Otto.
The following is a compact summary of other aspects of training at HEIDELBERG:
Advantages of an apprenticeship: Vocational training offers orientation, structure, a regular working day and security. It promotes personal development and paves the way to financial independence. At HEIDELBERG, there are also very good chances of being taken on and a good work-life 
balance.
Instagram: Anyone interested in an apprenticeship at HEIDELBERG can gain an initial insight virtually on Instagram: Under heidelbergerdruck_azubis, the trainees post self-produced content about their professions.
Application phase 2025: The application phase for apprenticeships and dual study programs starting in September 2025 is already underway. In addition to school grades, social skills and potential for the respective job profile will be decisive factors in the selection process for a training or study place at HEIDELBERG, especially with regard to the increasingly important digitalization in the industry. All information about vocational training and the career portal can be found on the HEIDELBERG 
website.

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Svenska Dagbladet embraces audio to increase engagement

17.10.2024
Audio is becoming increasingly important to audiences, and according to Sonali Verma, lead of the INMA Generative AI Initiative, it is one of the most prevalent ways news media companies are experimenting with generative AI.
During this week’s Webinar, GenAI audio and internal tools: experiments from two innovative news brands, Svenska Dagbladet’s Ebba Linde shared her company’s journey to embrace synthetic voice technology. As head of product and UX for the Schibsted-owned newspaper, Linde said the company had identified the growing importance of audio in users’ daily lives and saw an opportunity to make journalism more accessible and engaging.
The data showed that time spent in listening mode had doubled over the last decade, with 71% of Swedes having access to a paid audio subscription (music and/or podcasts), and spending about 33% of their day engaged with audio.
“Audio can give increased accessibility,” Linde said, adding that the audio format is good for people who have difficulty reading and it can make listeners feel closer to the story because voices convey emotion that doesn’t come through in print or on a screen.
“It also gives people who are busy the possibility to multitask; audio is a great function for that,” she said. “And we can, simply by delivering our content, be available for our users a larger part of the day.”
Even though podcasts have been around for several years, the market is continuing to grow, with 44% of users saying they listen to podcasts at least once a month. However, as SvD began looking at the feasibility of creating podcasts, it quickly ran into a wall: producing custom podcasts required more time and resources than the team had. So Linde said it was time to look at other ways to use audio.
She didn’t have to look far; in 2021, sister paper Aftenposten had jumped into the text-to-speech arena, having a journalist spend 34 hours in a studio to record more than 6,000 sentences that the AI could develop a cloned voice from. The results were impressive, as Aftenposten saw that users who listened to content finished a larger part of the article than readers.
“So we thought, let’s do the same thing, this will be easy.”
It wasn’t.
Turning text to audio
Six months into working on the audio project, SvD still didn’t have a usable product and was unhappy with the results, so Linde said it was time to pivot. The team decided to manually record some articles to see if audiences were receptive to them.
“We started with maybe three or four articles. We put the person in the studio, they just read the whole article,” she said. “Then we put the player in our article and the results blew us away. The user feedback was so positive, almost all users that gave us feedback for this were super positive.”
Users of all ages were asking for more audio content. This experiment showed that while users appreciated a manual voice more than a robotic one, there was a clear interest in audio content. Now, it is experimenting with AI-powered personalised playlists, using existing algorithms for text to create text-to-speech articles. This approach combines AI and user intent data to deliver audio content to logged-in and non-logged-in users.
Linde said the decision to halt the voice-cloning experiment was the right one. As AI voice cloning becomes mainstream, providers are emerging that allow companies to input less than five minutes of voice data and quickly receive a high-quality voice clone, which it uses for some shorter articles. At the same time, it still uses “real voices” for some articles. That has allowed it to compare what audiences find most appealing.
“What we see is that the 
user feedback for our manually read in article is much higher than the AI voice,” Linde said. “That doesn’t mean that we should stop our AI experiments. It just says that users still appreciate a manual voice more than a robotic 
voice.”
She also pointed out that while English versions of AI voice clones are “almost as good as a human,” the intricacies of Swedish and Norwegian dialects are harder to master: “They are a quite complicated language to make voice clones. So we will get there, but the quality is still not good enough to put the long read in an AI voice for us right now. But soon, probably, it will be.”
The promise and pitfalls 
of AI voices
As exciting as the opportunities of AI are for news media companies, Linde reminded that it’s “important to remember that we’re experimenting with something that, in a controlled environment, is adding user value.” But that doesn’t mean it can’t be misused in other ways. SvD is committed to not only using GenAI but also using its journalistic power to write about it and educate users about the dangers of deep fakes. She said it’s also important to be transparent about where and how the company is using GenAI.
“It’s not something that will scare off our users. We should use it as something that helps us, but we should also be aware of the misuse that is out there,” she said.
She said recent reminders of technology’s imperfection were found in Aftenposten’s AI-generated voices, when the phrase “deep fake news” became “deep fuck news” and “Martin Luther King Jr.” became “Martin Ludder King Jr.” Everyone using the technology needs to keep in mind that it’s not perfect and requires human 
oversight.
As AI tools continue to proliferate, Linde advised that companies avoid being distracted by shiny new objects. Instead, they should focus on the problems they need to solve and then consider how AI can assist them. The tools are widely accessible to everyone, so what will make them unique to each company is how they’re 
used.
“You should focus on what problems that you are in a unique position to solve,” she advised. “Ask yourself what the problem is where you have a unique competence or unique input to deliver so you are in a better position than others to solve this. Focus on your unique competence.”
-by Paula Felps-

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6 new appointments made to INMA Europe Division Board

17.10.2024
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Earl J. Wilkinson, Executive Director and CEO
The Europe Division of the International News Media Association (INMA) today announced new appointments to its Board of Directors, including a new executive committee.
Appointed to the division board’s Executive Committee are:
 President: Eimear Moran, Chief Operating Officer, The Irish Times, Ireland
 First Vice-President: Marc Isler, Chief Revenue Officer, Tamedia, Switzerland
 Second Vice-President: Lina Hedenström, Chief Executive Officer, NTM, Sweden
 Petteri Putkiranta, president of news and feature at Sanoma Media in Finland, has served as the Europe Division’s Board the past two years and will serve on the board as immediate past president for the next two years.
Three new Board members are:
 Director for Norway: Trine Eilertsen, Publisher, Aftenposten, Norway
 Director for Austria: Isabel Russ, Editor in Chief, Vorarlberger Nachrichten/Managing Director, Russmedia, Austria
 Director for Estonia: Silver Soomre, Chief Executive Officer, Postimees Grupp, Estonia
Elected to new terms were:
 Troels Jørgensen, Digital Director at Politiken, JP/Politikens Hus, Denmark
 Emmanuel Naert, Subscription Director, Euractiv, Mediahuis, Belgium
The INMA Europe Division Board manages the association‘s European activities, including training and development and membership services.
Board members are appointed to three-year terms, and national directors are rotated amongst INMA corporate member companies within each European state to maximise diversity in the Board amongst the larger INMA community. Executive committee members serve two-year terms.

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